firmitas utilitas venustas

Flashback: long-legged elves

When I was in the second grade I did an arts and crafts assignment. It was around St. Patrick’s day and we were given printouts of elves that we had to color in, cut out, and pin together.

I took the handout and instead of carefully coloring between the lines, evenly colored across each peice. A nieghbor saw this, and said that I should color in the lines. I said that since we’re cutting them out anyways, it would be better to color across the lines.

After we were done coloring, we started cutting out all the different parts of the elf. Each elf had two segments per leg, and many of the other kids only used one segment to make their elves look short. I went around to each table and gathered the spare segments, stuck them all together, giving my elf 6 leg segments per leg. A super-tall elf.

Thinking back, it’s difficult for me to ever remember doing arts and crafts assignments as defined by the instructions.